The Colossus of North London Has Arrived—Now Let’s See Who Notices By Diego “Match-Day Malthus” Serrano, filing from the global buffet of existential dread Haringey, London – Somewhere between the artisanal coffee concessions and the 65-metre bar that could hydrate a medium-sized nation, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium yawns open like a titanium clam that swallowed a…
Dubai—population 3.4 million, 92 percent imported—has never quite decided whether it is a city, a brand, or a fever dream induced by too much air-conditioning and not enough irony. From a distance it looks like a hedge-fund PowerPoint got drunk on 3-D rendering software and decided to build itself. Up close it feels like the…
St. Elmo’s Fire: The World’s Oldest Blue-Light Special, Now Playing on Every Continent By Dave’s Locker International Desk Dateline: Somewhere between the Strait of Malacca and your doom-scrolling thumb. If you thought St. Elmo’s Fire was just an ’80s Brat Pack film about beautiful people weeping into their trust funds, congratulations—you have already grasped the…
The Accidental Ambulance Chasers: How Injury Attorneys Became the World’s Dark Tourists of Disaster By the time the ambulance arrives in São Paulo, the WhatsApp group titled “Global Slip-and-Fall Avengers” has already exchanged 47 voice notes in four languages, two memes comparing the pavement to Swiss cheese, and one GIF of a lawyer diving into…
The View from Everywhere By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, 34A, Altitude 36,000 ft The phrase “the view” used to mean something quaint—an expanse of terraced vineyards, a cathedral spire, maybe your neighbor’s questionable taste in swimwear. Now it is a global Rorschach test: what you see depends on which apocalypse you subscribed to….
Only Murders, Universal Mayhem Dispatch from the Bureau of Obvious Calamities, International Desk Dateline: Everywhere – The phrase “only murders” began life as the punch-line to a very American joke: a true-crime podcast so niche that homicide is the sole acceptable plot device. Cute, until the rest of the planet realized the gag had grown…
The Ballad of the Global Supertramp: How One Man’s Train-Hopping Became the World’s Favorite Escape Fantasy PARIS—In a century when passports are biometric, borders are militarized, and your phone rats out your location every 3.7 seconds, the word “supertramp” has staged an unlikely comeback. Originally the surname of one Richard Davies—better known to his probation…
UHM Football: A Tiny Archipelago in the Global Coliseum By Our Correspondent, currently between time zones somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the departure lounge of Incheon, you can almost see Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium sinking slowly into the Pacific like a discarded kettle grill. That, dear reader, is the current stage…
**Fredericksburg: Where History Goes to Get Selfie-Sticked and Monetized** The international press corps has witnessed many peculiar American rituals—Super Bowl Sunday, Black Friday stampedes, the quadrennial democratic pageant they call “finding the least objectionable billionaire to govern us”—but few spectacles rival the anthropological wonder of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during tourist season. Here, in this colonial hamlet…
Horror Nights Tickets: The Global Scramble to Pay for the Privilege of Being Terrified By D. Locke, Senior Correspondent & Professional Glutton for Punishment If you want proof that the human race has officially run out of real problems to solve, consider this: horror-nights tickets—those overpriced wristbands that grant you entry to pop-up mazes where…
Horror Nights, Global Franchise of Dread, Celebrate Humanity’s Unpaid Therapy Bill by Matteo “Graveyard” Moreau, International Correspondent, somewhere between the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca and a fog-shrouded U.K. theme park If you’ve ever wondered what a billion-dollar coping mechanism looks like, buy a ticket to any Horror Night on the planet this season….
The Gloria Funicular: Lisbon’s Vertical Escalator to the Human Condition By our Special Correspondent, still waiting for the elevator to self-respect If you stand at the foot of Calçada da Glória on any given afternoon, you will witness a tableau so perfectly absurd it could be commissioned by the United Nations as a cautionary exhibit….
